Comments

I just checked that researchers Facebook page and he seems pretty mad about the distortions. Do not want to reply because I might give the appearance of being a stalker. Perhaps someone here can give him some feedback?

New Radio Ecoshock show looks into the record heat event in most of North America, dubbed “Summer in March”.

Interviews with Joe Romm of Climate Progress, and Jeff Masters of The Weather Underground. The thousands of heat records smashed, appear to be a mix of weather variation, boosted by a changed atmosphere (i.e. global warming).

NASA’s James Hansen has similarly said that heat events like the European killer of 2003, or the deadly Moscow heat of 2010 could not have occured without our added greenhouse gases.

I thought I’d quickly provoie a fixed version of that link that doesn’t work, but a cut-and-paste of the URL gives a scary list of warnings from my scriptblocker – never encouraging – and it still 404’ed when I temporarily allowed everything.

I don’t enjoy being confronted with having to apparently subscribe to a podcast where I actually just want to listen to a single show, and I was unable to find the program you refer to on the link from the homepage that goes to ‘weekly radio ecoshock show’ which is titled ‘weekly radio ecoshock show 2011′ .

I have found a program with an interview with John M that looks interesting, but I keep finding my cursor disappears when I’m trying to use the Mp3 player on one of the numeric-IP-address-style URL’s that the site utilises (another thing I don’t enjoy) – at the moment I can’t pause the bloody thing for that very reason!

I’m downloading this program now, and I’m sure I’ll enjoy it, but a bit of attention to the site at some stage may pay dividends!

I’n not a great fan of simple falsification in Popper’s philosophy of science – his “simplicity” criterion does not work. Try Imre Lakatos.

I said nothing about Popper’s philosophy of science, and I’m well familiar with Lakatos. This isn’t about scientific research programs, this is about a pet dogma of yours that is transparently unfalsifiable, in the trivial sense that you will do whatever is necessary, including blatantly ignoring the meaning of your own terms, in order to sustain it. By calling Hansen a “provisional” you establish yourself as a bullsh*tter and a fraud.

Given more time than I’ve got at the moment, I cold predict the responses of the “officials” to new evidence – relative to the “provisionals” responses. These predictions would be falsifiable.

I’m a “provisional”, fool, and my responses don’t fit into your tidy boxes, nor do those of a lot of other “provisionals” … nor do those of a lot of scientists who publish in peer-reviewed journals — the sort of people that you deem “officials”. Of course official responses generally tend to be more conservative than the responses of bloggers and blog commenters, for the obvious reason that I pointed out — the people who make them are held responsible for their statements. There’s nothing at all novel about this, or about the blogger/professional dichotomy, which is a far more sensible division than yours.

@ “Karen”, much as I hate to acknowledge it, yes, you are right. The megalomaniac Bob “Benito” Brown and his squadrons of black helicopters are out to get you.

Run Karen, run as far as and as fast as your little legs will carry you. Run far and hide – under a rock perhaps. This means that you will have to stop, cease and desist posting your constant barrage of witless pseudo-scientific and illogical dribble curb your philanthropic activities here, since you will give away your location to the zillions of BrownBots that infest the interweb every time you post.

Goodbye then “Karen”, we shall do our best to adapt to life here without you, but it won’t be the same…

Friends of the Earth spokesperson Bradley Smith said the decision was a “huge disappointment”.

“We demonstrated to the court and Xstrata that this project will exacerbate climate change, and they’re going ahead anyway.

“Xstrata did not contest the reality or impacts of climate change. They’re planning on building this mine knowing that it will create the same amount of greenhouse gas emissions as 72 countries combined,” said Dr Smith. “It’s unfortunate that our laws allow multi-billion dollar companies like Xstrata to ignore the outcomes of their reckless actions.”

Centennial [Coal]’s environmental assessment… had omitted to assess the full impact of greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the project. Although there was a detailed assessment of emissions arising directly from the project and from its electricity use, the environmental assessment was held to be insufficient for failing to detail the indirect impacts of burning of coal by third parties (both locally and globally)

(my emphasis).

I am not familiar with this case, but there may be grounds to appeal to the Commonwealth Minister (DSEWPaC) on Matters of National Environmental Significance, in which case there may be an opportunity to raise the same issue at Federal level.

What most pisses me off with mining applications these days is their outright disdain for the other significant environmental impacts. Their EIAs frequently acknowledge the project will cause significant ecological impacts, so they spend a few hundred K (petty cash as far as they are concerned) on a Species Impact Statement, make a few trivially miniscule concessions (mostly minor tidying up after they have pillaged the place) and sod off overseas to enjoy the substantial (and mostly unburdened by taxes or imposts) profits while the rest of us wear the considerable, enduring environmental costs. The flora and fauna (endangered or otherwise) just get wiped out as if it didn’t matter (even if it impinged at all on anyone’s consicence) on the basis of a consultant’s report, itself focussed largely on the increasingly lax requirements of ever-more watered-down environmental legislation.

TL;DR – if climate change provisions in the existing legislative paradigm cannot or will not force us to stop wrecking what’s left of the planet, there is f**k-all chance that legislation “protecting” threatened species will.

I popped over there the other day because I assumed – wrongly, as it turned out – that there I’d find one of the parties who was publicising the SkS hack material.

No – there are bigger fish to fry! Instead I found it was all ‘Gold, Gold Gold’ (à la the dwarves in Terry Pratchett!), Hayek, more Hayek, ‘Austrians’ as a heroic accolade (unrelated to Austria, where they don’t actually do ‘Austrian’, funnily enough) and the urgent realization that warmomarxosocialist undermining of the currency will sap all our vital bodily fluids.

Oh, and the concept of Conspiracy Theories is all a cunning plot hatched by the UN and its Regulating Class to ensure that no-one understands the appalling depths of the conspiracies involved.

And it’s got worse – hell, now there’s tungsten in the gold bars. Tungsten I tell you! Where will it end?! (Go and check if you think I’m making this up!)

You couldn’t make it up, and, frankly, I’m glad I can’t. The world beyond satire is equal parts depressing, scary, and amazingly dull.

Still, she’s getting the standard massive approval ratings for each post from the discerning fruitcakes and the other de-institutionalised who are turning up (how many bloggers do you know who go in for this ‘rate my post’ thing, incidentally?), so I suppose at least its keeping them all off the streets for the time being…

SteveC, unfortunately the Anvil Hill mine did get the go ahead and has been sold off to Xstrata and renamed Mangoola (and it is to my shame that one of the leading exec’s of Centennial Coal was a Uni friend of mine). Winning a court case is not enough, many times there’s been a win in court for the government to come along and change the rules of the game. Hunter vignerons had a win in the courts against one mine, the government of the day changed the rules and the mine went ahead. Moolarben number 2 is now in the planning stage and the EIS is, like most others, nothing more than a sales brochure and the offset areas they’re proposing are totally inadequate just for starters, the local aquifers are going to be ruined, one of the last corridors in the upper Hunter will be removed and we’ll be left with a void filling with ever saltier water.

Threatened species don’t stop coal mines, exposure of dodgy EIS’s don’t stop coal mines, social impacts don’t stop coal mines, disruption of aquifers don’t stop coal mines and you can be guaranteed greenhouse gasses won’t stop them. There was one coal mine stopped in the Hunter Valley, only because it was small and the horse breeders started flexing their bank books, unfortunately with the new state government it’s back on the table.

Perhaps I misinterpret your responses, but I infer that you might have made the same mistake that I did when I first read Geoffs piece. In talking about “provisional” and “official” he is not talking about the degree of authority with which a person speaks – Hansen could never be a “provisional” by that standard. Rather, Geoffs blog article specifically refers to the “troubles” in Ireland, in which the IRA split into several different factions, most notably the “official” IRA and the “provisional” IRA.

That creates yet more scope for misapprehension (“climatologists = terrorists”), but the point for Geoff is that he sees two camps: those who, in focussing on statements that can be made with a high degree of confidence, become a more moderate or conservative viewpoint, and those who are prepared to chance their arms on a balance of probabilities position who in the analogy are the extemists. For reasons I can’t really fathom, Geoff sees parallels with the “official” and “provisional” IRA respectively. Really, you simplify the whole thing by simply calling his second group “extremist” – I don’t think its any more or less perjorative.

Personally, I think the analogy is bogus on many levels, most particularly because the relationship between Geoff’s two camps is not remotely like the relationship between those two camps in the troubles. Nevertheless, if you reread his stuff with that view of “official” and “provisional” you get quite a different sense of what he means. Again, wrongheaded, IMO, but not quite as brainless as you interpret.

But perhaps you got all this, thought his analogy was even worse than I did and responded accordingly. Clarification or egg-sucking lessons…not sure…

Either way, thanks for:
>Frank simply spoke your language …

That is exactly correct. Was happy to discuss within Geoff’s framework for just long enough to think it through to “nope. doesn’t work.”

Yes, you’re right, Anvil Hill (aka Mangoola) did go ahead, despite the successful LEC case. I should have been more clear above in stating that the key ‘victory’ (and I’m not at all sure that one individual supported by an organisation that relies largely on volunteer labour, public donations and pro bono work bringing a case against a Minister simply to get the Minister to do their job properly can be called a “victory”) was the judgement that all reasonably foreseeable effects of the proposal must be considered.

Regrettably the Gray case only applies to applications in NSW. Qld and other states have differing so-called environmental protection legislation that I am not familiar with, but on face value Qld’s is not even as rigorous as NSW. When it was introduced in 1979 NSW’s EP&A Act (Environmental Planning and Assessment Act) was rightly proclaimed as one of the best and most effective pieces of environmental legislation anywhere in the westernised world, let alone Australia. Since about 1995 every successive NSW government (regardless of their nominal political stripe) has diluted and latterly gutted the EP&A Act, the 2005 Part 3A amendment being arguably the worst of the lot (whose involvement in which is the principal reason I loathe Bob Carr), if only for its appalling disregard for the role of public participation in environmental and planning matters and the obscene discretionary power it afforded the Minister for Planning. The very idea of retrospective legislation (that you mention) ought, to any society with claims to being ‘civilised’ and ‘advanced’, be anathema. Yet that’s what any party with money and clout could and does get (remember the retrospective POS that Dilemma passed that allowed film companies untrammelled access to the Blue Mountains Wilderness areas?). Environmental legislation a problem? Got money? Clout? No worries, let us as Macquarie St fix that for ya. The rest of us just get to wear the consequences for decades to come, all the while bemused why anyone questions why the electorate is quite so cynical about the political scene.

At a personal level, having worked in and spent many months tramping around in the less accesible parts of the upper Hunter, and got to know and love the area and its stunning (if often obscured) plant diversity, any new mining proposal there shits me to tears, particularly given the wholesale destruction of unique areas like Wybong. These days environmental campaigns aren’t – contrary to popular opinion – fought against greedy multinationals; they also have to fight state and federal government and the (in my view) unconscionable “laws” they pass. And all in pursuit of what?

But who cares. So what if jaded, cynical conservationists like me lose another argument and rail against something they don’t like and can’t change? Never mind the quality, feel the economic boom. We’ve got 300 years of coal reserves, so whaddaya f’kin’ whingein’ about?

“In October, the Hong Kong bankers discovered some gold bars shipped from the United States were actually tungsten with gold plating. This is the exact same Modus Operandi as the silver clad zinc dimes from 45 years ago.”

I suppose the point is Bill, that when the GlenBeckian-type collapse comes (orchestrated by bitter greens anxious to say ‘I told you so’, natch), those that are planning to eat their gold will find they stocked up on entirely the wrong condiments if it turns out to be tungsten.

In this situation of extreme danger, where one group is called the “officials” what else would you call the other group? The situation in Ireland is not one I like to think about more than I have to so alternative names would be very welcome.

The latest reponse from “the officials” was obtined by my MP from the Met Office on my behalf:

“Carbon dioxide and methane release from permafrost is an area of active research at the Met Office Hadley Centre. A simple framework has been developed for estimating the amount of carbon dioxide and methane release from permafrost. and to estimate the impact of this release on the global mean temperature. We expect this work to be published within the next 2 months. This is a step towards full representation or the permafrost climate feedback within the more complex Hadley Centre climate models – the outputs of which are used by the IPCC – which we plan to achieve within the next 2 years.

Currently, no work has been undertaken to incorporate methane release from ocean hydrates into Hadley Centre climate models.

spottedquoll and steveC, CO2 is only a feeble excuse to make you and me pay more for hydrocarbons.

Do you really think that any country or any government anywhere in the world will stop digging, drilling or fracking for hydrocarbons ?

I can assure you that they don’t want anyone to stop using these resources, they only want more money, CO2 is the excuse and they (the bureaucrats) do not give one flying fuck about the environment, you all are simply tools suckered in to help the agenda move forward.

If you want to stop the mining for fossil fuels you have to find an alternative, all efforts by your trusted governments so far have been pathetic, maybe they don’t really want an alternative ?

spottedquoll and steveC, CO2 is only a feeble excuse to make you and me pay more for hydrocarbons.

Do you really think that any country or any government anywhere in the world will stop digging, drilling or fracking for hydrocarbons ?

I can assure you that they don’t want anyone to stop using these resources, they only want more money, CO2 is the excuse and they (the bureaucrats) do not give one flying f##k about the environment, you all are simply tools suckered in to help the agenda move forward.

If you want to stop the mining for fossil fuels you have to find an alternative, all efforts by your trusted governments so far have been pathetic, maybe they don’t really want an alternative ?

“Current theories of the causes and impact of global warming have been thrown into question by a new study which shows that during medieval times the whole of the planet heated up.

It then cooled down naturally and there was even a ‘mini ice age’.

A team of scientists led by geochemist Zunli Lu from Syracuse University in New York state, has found that contrary to the ‘consensus’, the ‘Medieval Warm Period’ approximately 500 to 1,000 years ago wasn’t just confined to Europe.

In fact, it extended all the way down to Antarctica – which means that the Earth has already experience global warming without the aid of human CO2 emissions.”

Too bad Karen (Spotty) that you missed the boat. The senior author is apparently furious that the results of his study have been misinterpreted. But that’s hardly news – the deniers have been doing this kind of thing for years. They routinely take the work of others and twist it to support their pre-determiend worldview (because so few of them do their own research or get it published in good journals). The site C02 Science did that with a colleagues paper here that was published in Nature a few years ago. She was shocked, to say the least, that the results of her study were used to support the stupid argument that increased atmospheric C02 benefits terrestrial ecosystems. Her study never said that at all.

And simultaneously, in his first day in the job the new Liberal-National (= conservative) premier of Queensland, Campbell Newman, wants the director of the Office of Climate Change to [dismantle all of Queensland’s various current carbon reduction schemes](http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2012/s3464929.htm).

This is sure to thrill the vested interests and the ideologues, who can’t see past their wallets, superstitions and/or paranoias, but is is a sad day for any hope that real action will gain a foothold in Australia.

*CO2 is not a pollutant. Life on earth flourished for hundreds of millions of years at much higher CO2 levels than we see today. Increasing CO2 levels will be a net benefit because cultivated plants grow better and are more resistant to drought at higher CO2 levels*

Garbage. Happer should be embarrassed for writing such tosh. First of all, its not the absolute concentrations of atmospheric C02 that are important, but the longer term evolutionary trajectories of life under relatively stable C02 concentrations. Certainly life flourished under higher C02 concentrations than occur now back in the late Mesozoic and early Cenozoic, but that is completely and utterly irrelevant. Contemporary biota evolved under relatively low C02 regimes, and the rate of change is taking the atmosphere into concentrations that have not been experienced in many millions of years, all in the blink of an evolutionary eye. This is challenging species to adapt at rates far exceeding any natural changes that have occurred in millions of years. Moreover, of course C02 is a pollutant if concentrations cause asymmetric shifts in biotic responses. Not all plants benefit at higher C02 levels – r-selected plants and weeds might grow faster, but in many plants additional biomass will be accrued with a concomitant change in internal stoichiometry: N and P may well be shunted out of plant tissues leading to quite dramatic changes in the quality of these plants for herbivores. N is normally a limiting nutrient for first level consumers, hence (as has been seen in a number of studies) arthropod consumers will increase the amount of plant biomass consumed to compensate for N deficiency. Another important point is that plant defenses are generally either C or N based. Plants with C-based phytotoxins may become more toxic to consumers, whereas plants with N-based defenses will become less well defended against herbivores and pathogens. All of these non-linear effects will impact food webs and communities, eventually scaling up to ecosystems.

Essentially, Happer is rehashing Monckton’s stupid ‘C02 is plant food’ meme. As I said, his article is an embarrassment.

Ah, in the inversiverse all information that does not hail from Ordained Sources emanates from the Prince of Darkness, himself, right?

I know none of you guys – sorry ‘Karen’ – can do context, but I frankly don’t give a toss about your tungsten impregnated gold bars; I’m not calling in to question it happening, I’m calling in to question, in the first instance, whether it means anything at all to anyone outside of wibbleworld, and certainly whether it means anything like what you wibbleworldians are claiming.

I’m sure any explanation will turn out to be based firmly on good old fashioned Greed, and since that’s the most natural of human activities by your lights, and caveat emptor is the core of your philosophy; well, no problem, eh?

Sunspot and GSW’s only requirement for a reliable source is “do they say what I want to hear?”

Anyway Sunspot, I’m disappointed that I haven’t heard a peep from you about the current northern hemisphere heatwave seeing as your entire argument is predicated upon weather.

As you once said:

>The IPCC is being proven wrong by the cold “CLIMATE” almost everywhere !!!!

Even resident village idiot GSW realises this argument is a loser.

>I can assure you that they don’t want anyone to stop using these resources, they only want more money, CO2 is the excuse and they (the bureaucrats) do not give one flying f##k about the environment, you all are simply tools suckered in to help the agenda move forward.

So, how is offering a quote like that, and then providing a link to a news article (that says none of the things you say it does) based on a paper whose lead author flatly denies the very ‘interpretation’ of the quote you’ve given not simple and blatant dishonesty, then?

Lest there should be any doubt about what a truly shameful enterprise this whole pathetic effort is here’s a quote from the lead author’s Facebook page:

anyone knows journalism help me understand this? is this what reporters do these days? Add a conclusion, that they like, to other people’s work remotly related to the topic, coin a flashy title, and make big news?

They stand alongside other high-quality and discriminating science outlets, such as Stormfront.org, Beast Watch News (get all your latest End Times bible prophecy tid-bits here, folks!), globalclimatescam.com (better named than it thinks!), freerepublic.com, climaterealists.com, and that eternal fount of wisdom, urbanprepping.com.

Damn, lost one in moderation – not sure how long that might take to get out of it! – probably because I listed some of the dubious organizations that have swallowed whole the DailyFail’s squishy little chum-nugget.

Credulous / undiscriminating outlets include The GWPF and Andrew Bolt, you’ll be astonished to learn.

the Victorial Liberal (= conservative) government move to repeal the previous state Labor government’s legislation to reduce emission by 20% by 2020 because the federal government is mandating only 5%, and Victoria can’t “afford” to do better than the rest of the country

which just goes to show that “tragedy of the commons” works over time as well as space. What is the point of governments making promises for 10+ years in the future?

Thanks John @428. Yes, Happer is affiliated with some pretty notorious groups and think tanks. It never surprises me when I read an op-ed or column in the media by a so-called ‘expert’ deriding climate change that this person more often than not has links with some right wing groups or think tanks that are part of the denial industry. Have these people no shame?

“A team of scientists led by geochemist Zunli Lu from Syracuse University in New York state, has found that contrary to the ‘consensus’, the ‘Medieval Warm Period’ approximately 500 to 1,000 years ago wasn’t just confined to Europe.

In fact, it extended all the way down to Antarctica – which means that the Earth has already experience global warming without the aid of human CO2 emissions.”

If any of you 2nd graders knew how to use a search engine then you might not so stupid.

“Having constrained the depth of ikaite formation and δ18O of ikaite crystals and hydration waters, we are able to infer local changes in fjord δ18O versus time during the late Holocene. This ikaite record qualitatively supports that both the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age extended to the Antarctic Peninsula.”

I made no mistake. It’s a dichotomy — a pair of sets that together contain all members. One of the sets is “officials”; therefore, the other set (which he calls “provisionals”) must contain all non-officials. Putting Hansen in the latter set rather than the former violates the definition. There’s another dichotomy, the “conservatives” and the non-conservatives — call them extremists, alarmists, realists, whatever. Geoff invalidly glues together the two dichotomies, equating officials with conservatives and non-officials with non-conservatives, when these sets simply are not coextensive.

Again, wrongheaded, IMO, but not quite as brainless as you interpret.

No, it is quite as brainless/fallacious/dimwitted/erroneous/dogmatic as I have noted and explained, and not worth any more of either of our time. Geoff asked if his categories are useful and we both indicated that we don’t think so, but he’s committed to them … but he’s going to have to play that game alone.

‘Karen’, I know you struggle with contextual reading, and you’re angry because you’re ashamed at having been caught out, but, seriously, get a grip.

We showed that the Northern European climate events influenced climate conditions in Antarctica

Is what the man himself said. That’s why he’s so bloody annoyed at the dishonesty of the reporting, as I referred to above;

Add a conclusion, that they like, to other people’s work remotly related to the topic, coin a flashy title, and make big news

You then misleadingly posted that self-same wrong reporting in a manner that certainly looks intentional, further compounding the initial falsehood.

What you, and the remainder of your sad ilk don’t get, is that, if you actually read the original post that you linked to – but didn’t actually quote; unkind people might suggest that this is because Syracuse University has a credibility that the Daily Mail completely lacks, and you know it – is that he didn’t say the warming extended to Antarctica.

Dummy!

He couldn’t, could he, because he was examining a rare mineral that can only be found ‘be found off the coasts of Antarctica and Greenland’?

Hence the original article’s ‘are climate changes in one part of the world felt half a world away?’.

We showed that the Northern European climate events influenced climate conditions in Antarctica

Is not the same as ‘We showed that the Medieval Warm Period extended all the way to Antarctica’, is it? And if that’s what he meant, why is he clearly pissed-off?

Or are we about to go into one of those looking-glass-world things, where the ‘interpeters of interpretations’ and ‘pal-reviewers’ understand the meaning of a paper better than the author does?

> The next iteration will probably be performed by the moronic unpaid henchmen of the denialist machine – the readers and commenters of their blogs and media articles – who will exaggerate the misinformation even further to it’s logical end.

SteveC @ 412, it is entirely possible our paths have crossed at some stage, I too have done much wandering and swearing at plants in the upper Hunter over the past dozen or so years. A fantastic place for botanising.

Zunli Lu:
It is unfortunate that my research, “An ikaite record of late Holocene climate at the Antarctic Peninsula,” recently published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, has been misrepresented by a number of media outlets.

Several of these media articles assert that our study claims the entire Earth heated up during medieval times without human CO2 emissions. We clearly state in our paper that we studied one site at the Antarctic Peninsula. The results should not be extrapolated to make assumptions about climate conditions across the entire globe. Other statements, such as the study “throws doubt on orthodoxies around global warming,” completely misrepresent our conclusions. Our study does not question the well-established anthropogenic warming trend.

As was blatantly obvious to anyone with even the most basic literacy skills who’d actually read the very article ‘Karen’ linked to, but didn’t quote from!

I’d be inclined to cool my heels for a while, too, if I’d made such an utter ass of myself in a public arena.

And I note, yet again, that while hundreds, indeed thousands of papers, confirming warming are unconvincing, speculative, premature, overstated, limited in their implications, even questionably honest, etc. etc. it only takes one bloody paper – and only this solitary one is required – to prove the absence of warming beyond doubt.

And you don’t even need to actually read it!

You lot calling yourselves ‘skeptics’ is the most grotesque irony since, as Tom Lehrer was wont to point out, Henry Kissinger won his peace prize.

So, Karen, even though others have shown that the media articles spectacularly misrepresent the study, lets do a little thought experiment. Lets imagine that all these disparate and non-synchronous warming events over the Medieval were, contrary to the actual studies, actually all synchronous … ie the whole globe warmed at the same time at some point in the Medieval. The whole globe warmed synchronously … yet it did so in response to relatively slight solar and volcanic forcings.

In the real world, that logically must mean …

wait for it …

climate sensitivity is very high!

Perhaps you should stop and think and evaluate if what you are arguing for is actually what you want to argue for.

And to reiterate, actual studies do not show a globally synchronous MWP, meaning we have half a chance at slightly more moderate sensitivities being correct.

Quite frankly, anyone who pays good money to a rag such as the Daily Mail, that publishes obvious scientific untruths, is a mug.

The hacks who write for the Mail are either flagrantly and deliberately misrepresenting climate science, or they are so inept that they do not deserve to be granted the title ‘journalists’. ‘Propagandists’, perhaps, or certainly ‘shit-stirrers’, but nothing that even hints at professional, objective reporting of fact.

Cigarette packets have health warnings, and television programs have viewer warnings: tabloid papers such as the Daily Mail should mandatorily have warnings of unreliable and nonfactual content. That way the suckers who buy such rubbish might have half a chance to understand that they’re being had.

Here’s a comment from WUWT on the Ikaite issue, in response to mandas pointing out that Watts’ conclusions were incorrect, and that the lead author had gone on the record saying so –

What’s your point? That the author is now tap dancing? No doubt he was given a talking to. But nowhere does the author deny that the MWP was global.

Michael Mann is the reason people still try to erase the MWP, or call it an “anomaly”, and claim it was regional, not global. This paper is more strong evidence that the MWP was a global event.

In the Inversiverse all these spin-doctors and their drones do indeed believe they understand the implications of a paper better than the authors do!

In the Inversiverse the author is only responding like this now because he’s scared of the power of ‘the team'; perhaps if he refuses to knuckle under to Mike Mann he’ll lose grant-funding? This isn’t defamatory, of course – otherwise Anthony would surely remove it? – it’s just telling it like it is.

In the Inversiverse it’s up to the author to prove that his paper doesn’t disprove current anthropogenic warming and doesn’t show that the MWP was global, despite the minor technical detail that he was studying a rare mineral found only in frigid water in limited areas of the Acrtic and Antarctic, and the fact that ‘we clearly state in our paper that we studied one site at the Antarctic Peninsula.’

In the Inversiverse Watts is apparently under no obligation to publish Zunli Lu’s press release specifically responding to his own misinformation.

Hell no! In fact, in the Inversiverse Watts follow-up post is entitled ‘Yes, I know, I covered it first: The Medieval Warm Period was Global’. The troops can stop telling him about his very own coup, because he knows it all already! After all, in a very real sense, he wrote it…

In the Inversiverse 90%+ of the readers at Watts will only recall this whole episode along the lines of ‘remember that Ikaite mineral paper that proved the MWP was global?’ ‘yeah, that’s right, the Warmist were all squawking and they tried to make him retract it or something, but he never denied that the MWP was global in the paper and it proved it anyway!’

And outside the Inversiverse the disengaged public will pause only to note ‘oh, they still can’t make up their minds about global warming, no point in doing anything about it, then…’

*Sigh*. Does our resident ‘genius’ never give up in his little corner of the asylum? Another one of his long-winded ‘Jeffie’ rants. I must be worth the effort for him to spend hours on Deltoid with his hyperbole and rhetoric. Fact is I have much better things to do with my time than engage with a pseudo-intellect who in fact has not made even the tiniest dent in the scientific arena.

Tim: any chance you can close the door on the notorious Jonas thread once and for all?

He not only does he apparently understand the import of Zunli Lu’s paper better than the author himself does, he is under no obligation to draw attention to the author’s own statements in the matter in response to the very meme that Watts is happily claiming credit for inaugurating.

Bill, Excellent posts. Essentially, I have seen deniers do this kind of thing before. Its totally unethical. Like the creation lobby, they take the research of others and mangle it to produce conclusions they wish to derive from it. It happened to a colleagues paper that was published in Nature several years ago. The Idso site took the findings of the paper and attempted to spin them to show that increased atmospheric C02 benefitted soil as well as above-ground plant biomass. The article had nothing to do with that. My colleague was shocked and asked me if I knew who ‘these people’ were. I said of course I did. Dr. Lu’s work is similarly being distorted to downplay AGW. Its a disgrace, but it is in keeping with the well-worn tactics of the deniers. They will stop at nothing and will stoop as low as they can to bolster their sordid anti-scientific positions.